Conception

Kalisha Buckhanon

Cover

Praise for Conception

“The work of a gifted young novelist.”

—The Washington Post

“Readers … are richly rewarded.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“A poignant, heart-wrenching novel.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“[H]eartfelt and affecting.”

—Booklist

“Much like her acclaimed debut novel Upstate, Buckhanon is again at her best.”

—Mosaic literary magazine

Praise for Upstate

“A moving and uplifting story of love and hope in the face of adversity.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Upstate starts out strong and never lets go.”

—Chicago Tribune

“A realistic love story that’s set against an urban backdrop as gritty as its characters are memorable.”

—People

“A sensitive portrayal of young lovers that moves beyond gritty urban fiction.”

—Essence

“Captures the faithfulness and tenacity of young love.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Packs a swift, head-clearing emotional punch.”

—Elle magazine

“Filled with tragedy, despair, and hope.”

—Toronto Sun

“A gripping narrative and a thoroughly good cry … truly original.”

—Evening Standard (UK)

“A brilliantly raw debut novel.”

—Uptown magazine

“Wild and beautiful.”

—Sapphire, author of Push

“A literary gem.”

—E. Lynn Harris, author of
What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

Other Books by this Author

ALSO BY KALISHA BUCKHANON

UPSTATE

Title Page

KALISHA BUCKHANON

CONCEPTION

ST. MARTIN’S GRIFFIN NEW YORK

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Design by Dylan Rosal Greif

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

Buckhanon, Kalisha, 1977–
   Conception / Kalisha Buckhanon.—1st ed.
        p. cm.
   ISBN-13: 978-0-312-33270-9
   ISBN-10: 0-312-33270-X
   1. Teenage pregnancy—Fiction. 2. African American women—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.U264C66 2008
813′.6—dc22

2007040441

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-54514-7 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-312-54514-2 (pbk.)

First St. Martin’s Griffin Edition: February 2009

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedication

For Brenae, Isaiah, and Jaylyn

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My agent, Tracy Sherrod, I love you! Monique Patterson: I love you too, and thank you for being patient with me as I attempted to write this novel! Thank you to her assistant editor, Kia DuPree, for jumping on board and loving this book. I’d also like to thank the following for providing a quiet place to write: Andrea Holmes, in whose Bronx co-op I “accidentally” wrote the first chapter of this book; Robyn Gorbett, whose isolated Thawville, Illinois, trailer forced me to finally get into it; and the wonderful staff of the Orrington Hotel in Evanston, Illinois, in whose charming hotel I was able to achieve that first temporary ending. And a very special thanks to my manager, Felicia Pride, without whose assistance I may have never been able to get my life together in order to finish this book. I’d like to thank friends Erica Botts, Billie Burrell, Judith Trytten, Joseph DeLouise, Rob Walker, Erica McClendon, Ebony Madison, and Tara Betts for many reasons that they know of.

I would also like to thank the Alice Bernice Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University, where I workshopped the first half of Conception, and the University of Chicago Creative Writing Center, in whose Emerging Writers Series I read from the book for the first time. I must express gratitude to the following writers for their advice and support of my work and young career: Sapphire, Achy Obejas, Bayo Ojikutu, Harriette Cole, Terrie Williams, bell hooks, Sonia Sanchez, Kenji Jasper, Bernice McFadden, E. Lynn Harris, Terry McMillan, Sofia Quintero, Pittershawn Palmer, and especially Professor Dorothy Roberts, whose book on Black female eugenics, Killing the Black Body, proved to be an invaluable inspiration. Thank you to the following members of Achy Obejas’s writers’ group: David Driscoll, Patrick Reichard, Elise Johnson, and Sarah Frank.

And finally the St. Martin’s team, and all of the reviewers, reporters, readers, bookstore professionals, publications, libraries, teachers, colleges, high schools, and youth organizations who made my first novel, Upstate, such a blessed success.

PART ONE

FROM THE INSIDE looking out, life doesn’t appear rose-colored when you know most people—including yourself—may one day die just like a rose: dried out by trouble and time, fragile and shriveled, scent faded to odor, color bled away, shrunken parts vulnerable to each and every touch, head bowed and apologetic in demise. Now I know better than to mourn when my life ends before it begins. How much more graceful to be cut from a bush and turned upside down immediately after bloom, preserved for a near eternity before a crumbling explosion of blossoms too ashlike to ever be put back together again. I’m content to remain like a flower seed, tumbling in and around and throughout the earth, languishing in possibility and potential because birth always brings the consequences of confusion, sadness, disappointment, then death.

But I could be a Black child soon. One day. Maybe. I haven’t been born yet, but I want to be. I want to live in the world: clothed, fed, loved, guided, educated, magnificent, important, essential, and good. I want to contribute, do something important that might make the world go round just a little bit easier, change a few other lives when I finally get to live my own. But I must be born first. I’ve had chances, but I never made it.

Suddenly I see myself at six years old, jumping rope in a windstorm. Always before I come back, flashes of a future startle me right before I awake. These scenes in my mind break the promises they make; I’m never born so I never get to see them happen in an actual life. This time, I see I’ll have red, green, and black beads hanging on the end of my cornrows, locked in place with a tight tip of aluminum foil. When I bounce up from my toes the beads smack me back in the face. An old woman, maybe my grandma, opens the front door and lets her cooking smells out. She hangs from the tattered screen with her purple duster flying open just enough to see all the brown stardust scattered between her breasts. Who is she? And why do I mind her? She has a cotton white rag wound around her head. She doesn’t have to move her mouth to get me to throw down my rope.

If I have to tell you one more time … is what hereyes say.

I think about smacking my lips. I protest silently instead, leaving the rope she bought for me on the sidewalk, knowing it is vulnerable to the wind. Who is she? Will I ever find out? The roses planted in front of the house the old woman always dreamed of calling her own are being ripped from the ground, along with some planted basil and the dandelion weeds I give her for the dinner table on Sundays. Tiny, fast-moving black ants disperse and swirl because the wind has demolished their sand castles. I hope more don’t come out of the ground and start biting my legs because they are now like all the grown-ups I’ve known, furious they have worked so hard for nothing. I ignore the gusty currents of dust and open my mouth to taste the dirt. Then I catch my old woman a rose as it shoots past like a kamikaze. My palm closes around a menacing thorn. I walk up to the dull, leaning, one-story yellow house with the flower in my hand and a little blood running down my wrist. Behind me, I see a rusted chain-link fence with circles like a honeycomb. I imagine bees on their way to sting me, then I hear the bark of a big dog coming from somewhere inside. But I’m not afraid of any of this. People are the only things which disturb me. I don’t like when this woman twists her mouth at me, like she’s wondering why she ever liked me in the first place. I want to make her happy. I want her to think I can live forever, rise in smoke if I was burned and not even hundred-mile-per-hour winds are strong enough to carry away my ashes. So I don’t cry although it hurts. Instead, I hold up my hand and say, “Ma’am, look at me. Now, I’m just like Jesus.” And I really wanted to be.

For as long as I had known of myself, earlier than this dream vision of a blustery day that hasn’t happened yet, I was a dark soul floating through the arcane, craving the journey of birth, fashioning a life from God-given visions and my own make-believe. From the forever sleep I’ve awakened, in many times and many places, only to be forced to close my eyes and simply wait, forever and again. It was 1992 when it seemed ready to happen for sure, in a winter on the cusp of millenniums, in a no-name Pennsylvania town on the road from Chicago to New York City, when a girl named Shivana Golding fell in love with a boy who was not my father. She was strong enough to conjure the courage to embark on a quest less hopeless than being a magical but completely invisible Black girl on a crowded street in Chicago. She was fifteen, already aching for a purposeful life: to be a mother was a calling.

All the women who had conceived my soul but lost my life in the past had believed the same. And there were many before her—the sweet Yoshi, the spitfire Darlene, and the tragedy, Tawana. But faith alone had not been strong enough to anchor me to their wombs. I never grieved when I died; I tried again, though I wasn’t itching to find myself dropped into the vicious worlds I saw waiting for me through their eyes. When the months crept on and I grew older inside Shivana than with any others in the past, I started to believe I could see my face on the outside of my dreams. It was up to me to convince Shivana to want to see my face on the outside of her own dreams.

I knew I was eventually meant to make it—one day. I just wanted it to be a day when my life would be right. Until that day, I found solace in imagination’s peace, the pondering of the “what ifs”: What if the women had been White? What if the women had been privileged? What if the men had been taught how to love them? To those questions, I drew my own conclusions. I wish I could have shared them with all my mothers, if they could have heard me. And if I had found out, in time, how our shared story would finally end.

BACK TALK.

That’s how it sounds when a little voice inside of you splits your thoughts in half. Splashes the half-empty glass against the mirror you think through so you can consider it was fuller than you had thought. Makes you look past the tiny beads of your perspective to finally see yourself, and everyone else, as a shredded design in a kaleidoscope: complicated, unpredictable, subject to change but no less beautiful because of it. Sometimes, more beautiful because of it.

I heard something speaking to me, could tell something was trying to talk to me, and still tried to ignore everything I heard. I don’t care who she is, how much money she has, where she comes from, how good she believes her man is, or what the circumstances of her own coming into this world were. Every woman is going to have some questions when she finds out she has another life inside. And she will have doubts. And fears. Deciding on the life of somebody else isn’t the best place to be when you’re deciding on your own.

And so that’s where I was when I started hearing and knowing things I otherwise shouldn’t have known. That’s where I was when the whole world started to make some sense, become a little more focused and narrow. That’s where I was when I really saw and understood where I was in the world, in the order of things. I wasn’t a mote in God’s eye. He probably couldn’t have even found me had he looked for me through a microscope. I was living on the South Side of Chicago. I was barely passing school. I was poor but didn’t know it. I was never happy, or around people who were. I was going through slow motions that had already been set for me and that nobody was trying to accelerate. I was dreamless. I was unable to imagine me beyond the day I was in at the moment. I was sad about all the sadness around me. I was indifferent. Then I found out I was pregnant.

I look far back to remember our stories. And though my mind knows I am not looking back centuries, my spirit feels like it was that long ago. I always felt like a grown woman and an old soul, even before I became a mother. A grandmother used to always say, “Girl, I swear you act like you been here before.” Here was America, the North, Chicago. Now that I am no longer there, but here, with mature and wiser eyes I have a new perspective on just what being there meant, and I now know I was tougher than I gave myself credit for. I confess. I took advantage of youth’s luxuries: sulking, learning, misbehaving, dreaming, falling in love. I was always a sassy little thing and a treasure chest of contradictions; I straddled the fences between being rambunctious but withdrawn, brilliant but inarticulate, spirited but defeated. And now, finally and only after much time to think about it, I can laugh when I think about those last couple months of my life in that foggy and crazy-weathered city. A new perspective makes it hard to tell the story how it really was, because maturity wants to twist the details into a version of the truth that lets me off the hook. But I can’t leave out all the mistakes I made and the wrong I did. Despite even the parts of the truth for which I’m ashamed, I still feel like life turned out alright.

It’s hard to remember when exactly it began, why I left, how I ended up where I did and how I did, in the way I did. There may not be enough time to really start at the beginning, to remember or tell it all. But I guess if I really had to think back as far as I could about how and when I could tell somebody was fighting me, arguing and debating and challenging me, pushing me to grab a hold of my life, screaming at me though I couldn’t see the source of the sound, it would be a couple days before that somebody could have even been there. It would have been the fight, I think back. Because whenever I go back to think of all I could have done differently in those last months, it starts with the last fight with my mother. The change that changed me forever really started then. Some man may have burst a seed of life inside of me, but I know now it had always been there.

ONE

WHENEVER ME AND Ma fought, she always went for my hair.

When she was younger, everybody talked about her long, black, silky, Indian in the family hair. My hair’s bright rusty red color is one of the few things my father ever gave me, but I wished I had taken after my mother when it comes to texture and length. Maybe if I had, my life would have been different. Better, easier, calmer. Everybody talks about her “good” hair and whenever they do, she has to remind them how her only child, a girl child at that, wasn’t so lucky. And the hair isn’t the only difference between us. I’m short with a voluptuous butt and big breasts; she’s tall, hippy, with the small tits I haven’t seen since thirteen. Now she’s going gray and bald at the same time. Her hair is always balled up in a bun that looks like a steel wool pad. Most of the time, she wears a scarf.

She hadn’t asked me first, but she came into my room wearing my long Fendi head scarf that I had just bought from my favorite African man selling things on Forty-seventh by the El.She asked me if I had eaten all her Danish butter cookies, the cheap ones that come in the round blue aluminum tins. Actually, she told me I had eaten them. I didn’t even know she had bought any Danish butter cookies; I wouldn’t have eaten them all anyway since I only like the ones with the hard sugar dots on top. But trying to explain anything to Ma after she’s made up her mind is a waste of time. I lay down and tried to ignore her, but that never worked. When I didn’t answer her, she grabbed my Afro puff of a ponytail and twisted it tight in her hands. I could feel my scalp burning hot like when I left a perm in too long, only her pulling made it worse.

For as long as I could remember, I had let her hit me, slap me, or do whatever else she was going to do while calling me every name in the book. But this time I don’t know what happened, what came over me. I don’t know if it was because my breasts were sore because I was waiting on my period, but I fought back this time. I put my knees up, then for the first time since I turned thirteen and she started fighting me like she had fought men, I hit my own mother back. She held me down on my twin bed with one hand and started slapping me openhanded with the other. I heard her screaming at me, cussing me out because she was surprised. I think she was a little scared too, or maybe nervous, so I was glad. I felt tears coming, but I held them back. My throat lumped up while words came up from out of my stomach, out of my heart, out of my mouth, and into my mother’s twisted face:

“Keep your hands off me …”

That was a couple days before my aunt Jewel came back, and that’s how those police who came busting through the door after the neighbors called found us—two grown women screaming the same thing over and over, and neither one of us shameful enough to cry. That was when I knew my mother’s life and mine had to change.

• • •

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